Prepping Raw Recruits For Their First Football Game

This is the second in a series by Jim reporting on his efforts to rebuild the football program that had been badly neglected at a local middle school. Follow along each week as he and his fellow coaches try to turn the program around.

Another interesting introductory week of middle school football. Saturday was our tenth practice. We need for each kid to have twelve practices to be eligible for our first game, and we will have had a total of fourteen by Thursday, game day. However, we need more, lots more. The big plus is that these kids are both talented and eager to learn. The big drawback (make that BIG DRAWBACK) is lack of experience. Most of them have not only not played on any kind of team, they had also never even seen a high school football game or watched a college game on TV. Unfortunately, for most of them, their only exposure to football was the NFL on Sundays. In my estimation, there is little or nothing to be gained or learned from that NFL exposure or from any Fantasy Football league, except the falsehood that football is NOT a team game. To the contrary, football is, in fact, the consummate team game.

To get thirty (plus) young boys to act in unison in warm-up drills is usually a challenge, but these kids took less time to become comfortable with the timing and rhythm of the drills than any group I have had in the past ten years or so. The next step after conditioning and the teaching of the skills of blocking, tackling, throwing, and catching was the concept of hitting. Bill Parcells, the great NFL coach, once likened football players to dogs and said that if they don’t bite when they are young, they won’t bite when they are grown. That was Parcells’ way of saying that if kids are aggressive when they are young then, they will be aggressive when they are grown, they can’t be taught aggression. While he may be an expert on NFL-ready players, he knows very little about kids. I usually tell kids that hitting in football is like eating vegetables; a few kids like them the first time they try them, a larger number of kids will learn to like them as they grow older, and some never will. They will never know unless they try.

So, after walking and jogging through half-speed tackling and blocking drills against dummies, blocking shields and each other, it was time to teach the young pups to bite (actually, it was more of a nip). We had them select a partner of equal size and ability (We tell them to grab a dancing partner), stand across the goal line and facing each other, grasp each other just above the elbow, place their right foot forward, crouch in what we term the hit position, and pull each other into a full contact with the top of the right shoulder pads. This is done five times on each shoulder and we do both shoulders twice. We then have the kids get into a three-point stance and extend into each other’s shoulder pads five times, getting back into the three-point stance each time. We do the five hits with each shoulder twice. It is called “shocking up” and is done as a prelude to any full contact drills. This is the best way I have found to introduce the concept of hitting to the kind of kids whom Parcells would say would never “bite”. We have some excellent line prospects, bit kids, smart, and fast. We also have three excellent athletes, running backs named Xavier, DeVonta, and Keenen who had never played the game prior to September 7 of this year, two weeks ago. All three of them can hit as though they were born to it. Will everyone step up and follow suit? Some others already have, and I’m betting that the entire team will do exactly that on Thursday, Sept 23, our first game.

We’ve come a long way in a short time. Our play book is a condensed version of the varsity’s, and we will be using their defense. What it will actually look like is anyone’s guess, but win or lose it will be fun. Everyone will play and test themselves. They will begin to understand what teamwork is all about, and they will understand the pride that comes with working hard for a goal with other young men who be their teammates for the next four years and friends for life.
Jim Olsen